Summers Accident Repair Centre is a small family-run business, based in Kent, and have operated on the same site since 1946.
They were one of the first British body shops to be approved by Audi and Volkswagen; to work for these leading brands everything has to be just right, from a skilled workforce to top-notch facilities. Their main aim is to remove the customer’s stress of dealing with the aftermath of an accident, whether it’s a small, light impact or full structural repairs.
At a chance meeting, Mark, BISON’s MD, encouraged Ian Summers to think about the untapped value of his brand. Summers was already doing well, but Mark put it to Ian that they could perform even better with a little investment in their visual identity.
When they met BISON, Summers was already thriving. Employing the fifth member of the family line, brothers Ian and Martyn were driving the business forward, but BISON proposed taking their branding and business to another level.
Over a period of eighteen months, BISON worked closely with Summers to create a completely new look for the brand. A number of options were developed and put forwards to Summers with mock graphics showing the new branding in situ. The striking branding they settled on encapsulates Summers’s heritage, trusted reputation and professionalism.
BISON also recommended changing the brand name from Summers Motors to Summers Accident Repair Centre; this meant they more clearly defined their target audience, without losing any of the company’s family heritage.
The new-look Summers’s brand was rolled out to every point of customer contact:
BISON provided a complete end-to-end service, creating and implementing a deployment plan that took the rebranding from design through to the production and installation of all of the assets. BISON also recommended a strategy to become a leading and trusted voice in the industry and proposed new professional photography to maintain Summers’s high-status image in all communications.
BISON managed and art directed a professional photo-shoot, providing Summers with a gallery of images for future use, all containing the Summers DNA.
The end result is a brand identity that matches up to Summers’s professional customer service and high repair-service standards.
Since launching the new brand Summers has won three national awards. The branding now reflects what the business has achieved in the last seventy years and this has bred confidence in their customers, and raised the company’s credibility and reputation in the industry.
The rebrand has changed the way people look at Summers. Without doing anything else differently, they are now being noticed and recognised, and this has given them pride in their new image, which now sits comfortably alongside their customers’ brands: Volkswagen and Audi.
Before meeting BISON, Ian had never considered the importance of branding, but by being open to fresh ideas he is now an industry pioneer, and is as proud of his brand as he is of his business and its reputation.
Our experience of BISON was excellent – it was a pleasure working with the whole team. They had such a fresh approach – they encouraged us to think differently and consider how we wanted to be perceived. We hadn’t realised the significance of signage and how we could improve things like brand recall, or convey our reliability through the choice of colour, eye-catching design and professional photography.
So, in many ways, working with BISON has been an education that has helped us to appreciate the value of our branding.”
